(ALT.MVC means any MVC-style framework for .NET that was not written by Microsoft.)

For the past few weeks, my commute-time hobby project has headed in a completely new direction, and I’ve been working on a completely new MVC framework for .NET. I was inspired to do this mainly by some of the other offerings in the ALT.MVC space, such as NancyFX, FubuMVC, Simple.Web and OpenRasta, and I was curious to see just how much effort is involved in getting a minimum viable framework up and running. About two weeks, it turns out, plus about the same again to add some spit and polish, though the end result is pretty spartan. It doesn’t (yet) have any kind of model binding, or validation, or CSRF protection, or authentication and authorisation, or even session management. But these will come in due course.

Different MVC frameworks have different emphases. ASP.NET MVC is generally designed to appeal to as broad a constituency as possible. As a result it’s a bit of a jack-of-all-trades: it does everything under the sun, most of it passably, some of it awkwardly, and none of it brilliantly. FubuMVC is designed for people who are steeped in Clean Code and design patterns, and who have a degree in Martin Fowler. NancyFX is built around the “super-duper-happy path”: its aim is to keep things as low-ceremony and low-friction as possible. WebForms was designed to ease the transition to web development for traditional VB and Delphi developers, who are used to event-driven drag-and-drop RAD programming. The result is a complete untestable mess, simply because the web doesn’t work that way.

The key emphasis behind my own MVC effort is modularity. Most MVC frameworks encourage a fairly monolithic design to your application. Sure, they may be extensible using IOC containers and so on, but you’ll have to jump through several hoops in order to implement feature toggles, or A/B tests, or plugin frameworks, and even then your solution will be partial at best. My MVC framework, on the other hand, is built entirely around the concept of pluggable, switchable modules. This allows for some unique features. For example, you can have your static files—your CSS, JavaScript and images—switchable along with their corresponding server-side components. Turn off the feature that serves up /my/secret/script.js and it will give you a 404 when you try and access it in your web browser.

Anyway, enough of the sales pitch, let’s take a look at how it all works. A module looks like this:

This tells us that all files within your content folder should be served up as static files; that your views are all in your views folder, and registers a handler called Index to handle your home page. Handlers might look something like this:

This class handles all GET requests for the home page with the view at views/hello.mustache using an anonymous class for our model. I’m using Nustache as the default view engine at present; since these are the same as Mustache views, you can easily use them on both client and server. Note that you can only have one route per handler: this is by design as it is much closer to the Single Responsibility Principle, and reduces the number of dependencies that you have to inject into your controllers that end up not even being used on most of your requests.

As I say, it’s still very much early days yet, and it’s not production ready by a long shot, but there are several things I’ve got planned for it. If you fancy getting involved with something new in the ALT.MVC space, then I’m always open to suggestions and pull requests. You can find the source code in my Dolstagis.Web repository on GitHub, or drop me a line in the comments below or to @jammycakes on Twitter.